- You may think you're still Elizabeth, but you're not.— Sheppard
Atlantis is experiencing some odd equipment malfunctions- first with a Jumper, then with the city itself. They're eventually contacted by the source: it's Weir, last seen having converted from human to Replicator. She explains that her group of Replicators had still been working to achieve Ascension, hoping they could find a way around not actually being human. They'd got close, but in the process trapped themselves in a kind of disembodied digital limbo. Per the episode title, they're now literal ghosts in the machine (or at least ghosts in subspace, hopping in and out of machines). But they know Atlantis has a device capable of creating new Replicator bodies for them, and they want to use it.
Tropes:
- Brain Uploading: The surviving Asurans attempted "digital ascension" by uploading their minds into subspace. But rather than ascending to a higher plane of existence, they were simply cast adrift.
- Continuity Nod: When Weir builds a Replicator body for herself, she uses the last template in the machine; McKay's FRAN Replicator from "Be All My Sins Remember'd".
- Game of Chicken: Woolsey plays this with the Replicators. He wins.
- Thrown Out the Airlock: Weir and the other Replicators are sent through the Stargate to a space gate, left to drift in space forever.
